Poland's last communist leader dies at 90

GENERAL Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland's last communist leader, has died as Poles voted in the European Parliament elections, highlighting Warsaw's solid anchoring in the West a quarter century after communism fell.

"It's a symbolic end to the first 25 years of the new democratic Poland," political scientist Eryk Mistewicz tweeted after Jaruzelski died at age 90.

Stricken with cancer, he passed just days ahead of ceremonies marking 25 years since Poland's June 4 semi-free elections that heralded communism's demise.

US President Barack Obama and other world leaders are expected at the Warsaw events honouring the ballot won by the freedom-fighting Solidarity trade union.

Jaruzelski - whose strongman image was accentuated by dark glasses and a rigid posture - was a complex and controversial figure.

Poles remain divided over the martial law he imposed in 1981, cracking down on the nascent Solidarity.

He insisted the move saved Poland from a potentially bloody Soviet invasion, but critics argue that it only bolstered his regime.

"I lost many battles against him, but I won the war for a free Poland. I do not know all his motivations, so I will leave the judgment to God," Jaruzelski's former adversary Lech Walesa said Sunday.

"His generation had to make difficult choices. Some adhered to the Communist treason, others tried to fight it from the inside," the ex-president and Nobel Peace laureate said.

Paying tribute to the man who once tried to crush his Solidarity movement, former Solidarity union leader Walesa said the general was in an unenviable situation when Polish shipyard workers rose up against communist rule in 1981.

"He probably knew very well the Soviet mentality, and their missile arsenal. He had the right to think, like many in the world, that there was no other way," he said.

Walesa added that in private, the General was a "very intelligent man, full of humour. I could listen to him for hours."

For Henryk Wujec, one of Solidarity's founders, martial law was "the worst thing. It meant seven years of bad luck for Poland."

"Countless people suffered, many died. He's responsible for it," he told the Polish PAP news agency.

He acknowledged, however, that Jaruzelski was willing to "change his mind, backtrack and sit down with Solidarity at the negotiating table to find a solution. Many of his associates were against it, but he went ahead."

"It's this turnabout that will guarantee him a spot in history, since the June 4 elections changed Poland and all of Europe by bringing about communism's demise," he said.

Former comrades from the Communist party are now defending his memory, notably stressing his role in Poland's peaceful transition to democracy in 1989.

"Years will pass and our era will go down in history as the one that spurred a shift in the political system. The man behind this shift was General Jaruzelski," said his ally Stanislaw Ciosek, a former Polish ambassador to Moscow.

"We refuse to give him credit, and yet without him, we would be hard-pressed to explain this bloodless transition."